Edwin Pope

John Edwin Pope started covering games for the Athens Banner-Herald in Georgia when he was eleven. At fifteen the paper made him sports editor, which by most accounts made him the youngest person holding that title anywhere in the United States. Small-town papers in the 1940s ran short of men for obvious reasons, and a teenager who could type and knew the rules was worth having. Pope never treated it as a curiosity. He treated it as the start of a career, and it was.

He went on to the University of Georgia, then to United Press International and the two Atlanta dailies, the Journal and the Constitution. By 1956, at twenty-eight, he already had more years in the business than many colleagues twice his age.

The Herald hired him in 1956 as a columnist and assistant editor. Within a year he was sports editor, and he held the job until 2003, an extraordinary run at one desk. The column continued after that. His last pieces for the paper appeared in 2016, sixty years after the first, and he died the following January in Okeechobee, Florida, at eighty-eight.

Sixty years on one paper is a number that needs context. Newspaper careers in the second half of the twentieth century were mobile; the good ones moved from paper to paper as the offers improved, and a columnist who stayed put was either underpaid or attached to the place. Pope was attached. Miami readers who started with him in the Eisenhower years were reading the same byline, in the same paper, when Barack Obama was in his second term. Few American columnists in any section can claim that.

The timing of his arrival mattered. Miami in 1956 had no major-league team of any kind. Over the next four decades the Dolphins, the Heat, the Marlins and the Panthers all arrived, along with the Doral golf tournament, tennis on Key Biscayne and the racetracks that gave him a second specialty in thoroughbreds. Pope covered the city's whole transformation from a winter resort into a sports market, and his column was the running record of it.

Pope was in the press box for Super Bowl I in January 1967 and for every one after it through Super Bowl XLVII in 2013, forty-seven games in a row. Only a handful of writers ever managed the full streak, and he did it while also running a sports department for most of those years. The Dolphins' perfect 1972 season happened on his watch, in his city, and the Herald's coverage of it is still the reference point for how a local paper handles a team that suddenly belongs to the whole country.

Sports editor at fifteen. Super Bowl I through XLVII. Sixty years on one paper.

The horse-racing work earned him three Eclipse Awards for columns on thoroughbred racing, and the National Headliner Club recognized him four times. He published early too: Football's Greatest Coaches in 1955, while still in Atlanta, and Baseball's Greatest Managers in 1960. A collection of his columns, The Edwin Pope Collection, appeared in 1988 as part of a series on contemporary American sportswriters.

The Associated Press Sports Editors gave Pope the Red Smith Award in 1989. He was sixty-one and still both editing and writing, which made him an unusual recipient: most honorees by then had long since chosen one role or the other. The award recognized a working sports editor who had never stopped filing columns, a combination the A.P.S.E., an organization of editors, understood better than most.

There is a reason editors who write are rare. The sports editor's day is meetings, budgets, staffing charts and the phone call from the publisher; the columnist's day is the press box and the blank screen. Most people who try both end up doing one of them badly. Pope's method, as far as the record shows, was to do the editing in the office and the writing wherever the game was, and to keep the two from arguing with each other in print. The Herald column read like a columnist's column, not a manager's memo, and the section under him was staffed like a sports editor's section, with beat writers who stayed for decades.

More honors followed. The Football Writers Association of America gave him the Bert McGrane Award in 2000. He was inducted into the National Sportscasters and Sportswriters Hall of Fame and the Florida Sports Hall of Fame, and both the Pro Football Hall of Fame and the College Football Hall of Fame recognized his work. For a man who began at eleven, the arithmetic of his career is hard to beat: roughly seventy-seven years of bylines.